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Researchers Created AI That Hides Your Emotions From Other AI 10%

As smart speaker makers such as Amazon improve emotion-detecting AI, researchers are coming up with ways to protect our privacy.

Jewish residents allege illegal construction by neighboring Arab town, in bid to keep it at a distance -50%

Israel advancing a plan to add 4,000 housing units to Arara ■ Town’s mayor says illegal construction halted as precondition

The Cold War spy technology which we all use 45%

Radio-frequency identification, famously used to bug the US embassy in Moscow, is a cheap way to track objects and data.

Our point of view creates our reality: Dr Dain Heer

By changing our outlook on life and things, we could change our life, says Dr Dain Heer, an author and co-creator of the self-help system Access Consciousness. He suggests using simple Access Tools, like asking questions, to create a life we desire.

Hey Google, Israeli startups are joining the voice-tech revolution

Siri, Alexa, competing with keyboards. But there’s still plenty of innovation left to do

The Astros Are Major League Baseballs Happy Place 50%

With a sophisticated use of analytics and a culture of frankness in the clubhouse, Houston has become the envy of M.L.B.

In the Jacobs family, playing sports and rooting for UCLA takes precedence

Allison Jacobs is top girls' volleyball player at West Ranch headed to UCLA

Why corporations redefine progress

The influential Business Roundtable’s new purpose for corporations reflects the global search for less-material definitions of progress. The search itself is progress.

Barr Seized on Epstein Case as Doubts Mounted About Justice Dept. 2%

The attorney general has been unusually personally involved in the investigations into the jailhouse suicide of Jeffrey Epstein, the high-profile financier accused of sex trafficking.

Home of the Week: Encino new build puts forth a fresh face 26%

Listed for $3.195 million, the newly built Encino home features a distinct exterior and interior living spaces full of custom details.

Go all-out with this luxurious Israeli breakfast at home

These are all the recipes you need to transport yourself to a Middle Eastern summer day on the beach.

Doctors pull venomous brown recluse spider out of US woman Susie Torres ear -25%

The discomfort in Susie Torres’ left ear felt like the water that can get stuck there after swimming. She heard swooshing when she woke up on Tuesday and assumed it had been caused by an allergy shot.Torres, of Kansas City, Missouri, discovered she was wrong when doctors extracted a dime-sized, venomous brown recluse spider, Fox 4 News reported.When a medical assistant looked in Torres’s ear, she ran out of the room to get her colleagues, KSHB reported. The medical assistant told Torres she…

Building is finished, but Queen St. curb lane is still closed

People who travel on Queen St. are fed up with a traffic squeeze caused by a lane closure that no longer appears necessary, writes Jack Lakey.

A thief and a runaway with Down syndrome bond in The Peanut Butter Falcon 10%

Sweetly comic yarn puts a contemporary spin on ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.’

Rosie DiManno: Liberals should be ashamed for dredging up Andrew Scheer same-sex marriage speech -29%

Andrew Scheer was hardly an outlier when he stood up in the House of Commons in 2005 and expressed his opposition to same-sex marriage, writes Rosie DiManno.

Florida sheriff hits, kills man crossing the highway in Hernando County, cops say -10%

The Citrus County Sheriff hit and killed a man on the highway Wednesday night. Shortly after 9 p.m., Sheriff Mike Prendergast, 62, was driving home on U.S. Highway 19 in … Click to Continue »

Festive dishes for your Purim feast

A festive meal is a mitzvah on Purim. Let these dishes keep you in the holiday spirit.

DOL takes on 'religious freedom' for federal contractors -50%

Unfair labor practice charge filed against Warren campaign — Shell workers told to watch Trump, or skip work without pay

Reading Between the Lines: in the Law, in Therapy, in True Crime

Readers respond to recent issues of the Sunday Book Review.

Six ways Trumps new public benefits immigration policies could hurt children and schools 10%

The administration recently announced it was going to change the criteria for extending green cards and visas to immigrants, to favor the wealthy.

Is the 2020 Olympics an opportunity for Japan to tackle seafood sustainability?

From tuna to sea urchin, Japanese cuisine is all about seafood. But with fish stocks critically endangered, tourists sampling local delicacies may be harming marine life more than they realize.

Fashion leaders to meet at G7 summit to improve sustainability, from HM to Gucci

'We have to work collectively'

I repaid Virat Kohli's faith in me, says Ravindra Jadeja 35%

Ravindra Jadeja was chosen over spinner Ravichandran Ashwin for the first Test. Many former cricketers have criticised the decision of leaving out Ashwin. "Obviously you feel good when the skipper believes in you, thinks of you as the main player. Luckily, I have been able to repay the faith by performing well," Jadeja said.

Woman finds venomous spider in her ear after mistaking it for water

The spider, identified as the venomous brown recluse spider, did not bite the woman

Sex and Power in The Catholic School -5%

Paul Elie on how Edoardo Albinati’s gratuitously long novel about religion, gender, and violence becomes a test of its own unruly philosophy.

Drizzle makes White Night crowd fizzle, displays still sizzle 17%

Crowd numbers at the final night of White Night were dampened by rain - but those who braved the wet enjoyed an absorbing display of acts.

Is Europe coming around to Putins Munich warning, or is this yet another false dawn? -5%

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to France is being hailed as a revolutionary turn in the European Union’s policy toward Moscow. While that would be a step in the right direction, rumors of it might be greatly exaggerated.
Read Full Article at RT.com

Why Tool Could Be More Relevant Today Than Ever Before

A heavy-metal giant is awakening from a 13-year slumber, but does the domain it once ruled remain? From the early ’90s to 2006, the foursome of Tool stood as a rock-and-roll epitome when rock and roll was a social average. As grunge issued a culture-wide call to bond over psychic wounds by comparing calluses, Tool responded with gnarlier body-and-soul horror than many were prepared for. By the time the band’s frightening bass lines and abject-trauma themes had been sucked into a popular nu-metal movement lacking mystery and brains, 2001’s Lateralus fell from the sky like a 1,000-page New Testament, or at least like a textbook dusted with DMT.

But today, even the wave of car-commercial guitar pop that was cresting around the time of the band’s 2006 motley, 10,000 Days, has crashed and dissipated. Rock still matters, but as a rumor, an input, in the ongoing brainstorm—between rap and everything else—that represents American pop today. If Tool was a best-selling alternative to a mainstream branded as alternative, that’s not a paradigm that computes anymore. Nor has there been an easy way for it to be rediscovered and redissected since its absence. The band kept its music off streaming and download platforms. Even many of the onetime diehards (ahem) let their devotion lapse when their CDs scratched and their iPods fritzed.

Earlier this month, though, the band flung open its survival-shelter doors and put the bulk of its music online, finally. The response was great reaffirmation. Five of Tool’s releases immediately entered the top of the iTunes sales rankings, and the band became the first ever to occupy all 10 leading spots on Billboard’s Rock Digital Song Sales chart. Later, the group announced a new album (debuting on August 30) and released its title track, “Fear Inoculum.” With its 10-minute, 22-second run time, that song became the longest ever to land on the Hot 100—an especially fun feat in an era of generally declining song lengths.

Pent-up demand and nostalgia from its cult surely help explain Tool’s sudden charts takeover. I’ve now gone back and listened to the music I obsessed over in high school: It’s still deliciously huge and transporting. But certain elements land more queasily—not because the band is out of time now, but because it chimes with the 2019 cultural moment in deep and not-totally-reassuring ways. With its churning riddle-songs, Tool swirled psychoanalytic ranting, evolutionary pseudoscience, and omnibus spirituality as a reaction to modern tech-assisted burnout. Listen to the mantras of the present moment—the gurus as politicians, the social doctrines with radical diets, the astrology craze, the conspiracy theories, and the suspicion of reality as a simulation—and you hear the frontman Maynard James Keenan’s grumbles.

Maybe Tool planned its return after noticing that Carl Jung has made a big comeback. BTS, the Korean pop sensation, named an album trilogy after the German philosopher’s schemas. Jordan Peterson, the much-debated Canadian professor-preacher, has repurposed ideas about anima and ego for a new generation. Back in 1996, Tool’s Ænima took a stab at doing the same, with the hypnotic swirl of “Forty Six & 2” describing exactly the process Peterson now touts: integrating people’s “shadows,” a.k.a. their suppressed creep, into their waking self for a transcendent sizzle. One YouTube video I recently came across made the insightful point that that song ends with all the instruments banging on one note, surely to represent the narrator’s arrival at inner unity. That video was, naturally, drawing the connection between Peterson and Tool.

That connection is coincidental, but it isn’t meaningless. Part of Tool’s appeal was that it took metal’s fantastical pangs—previously rendered with dragons, wizards, sci-fi, Satan—and seemed to dignify them by drawing on rule systems: science, philosophy, religion. Doing so allowed listeners to access gut pleasures with the pretense of mind expansion. Call it heavy edutainment or rifftastic self-care. The title track from Lateralus was written in time signatures determined by the mystic math of the Fibonacci sequence; Keenan’s lyrics mapped out Jung’s theory of individuation using references to alchemy. But it is a great song because of its massive, grinding, straining sound, evoking a slow-motion uppercut aimed at the sun. The music yearns for enlightenment so powerfully that it seems to, in bits and flashes, actually provide it. Which is also what pseudo-rational rule clubs of all sorts do.

I thought of Tool recently when an earnest young man told me, in a TED Talk–y explanatory tone, that the problem with society is that we put hot sauce on everything. What he meant was we’re overstimulated—by entertainment, flavor, porn—and the only remedy, per something his friend read on Reddit, is to do “dopamine resets”: spending a day not doing much other than walking outside. What a common thought, and what a Toolish thought. The band’s moan against the numbing effects of what some term “cultural decadence” lasted from the titling of its 1992 debut EP, Opiate, to the anti-TV ranting of its 2006 single “Vicarious.” On 1996’s “Stinkfist,” Keenan described an extreme sexual act so as to argue, per the lyrics, that there’s “something kinda sad about the way that things have come to be desensitized to everything.” On Joe Rogan’s podcast last month, he lamented widespread addiction to “dopamine” and pleaded with listeners to, yes, go take a walk.

The ascetic impulse is an ancient one—the Sabbath is a dopamine reset, no?—with obvious appeal in the era of Netflix auto-playing (ugh). But purification of the self has, of late, been hitched to larger, more unsettling purification missions: See the reactionary politics that have accompanied Peterson’s lifestyle counseling, or the white nationalists who’ve espoused “no wank” credos, or the anti-vax implications of Marianne Williamson’s love-heals-all gospel. All of that may seem far from Tool’s dark, boot-clad, skeleton-tattooed aesthetic, which is firmly in a cathartic metal tradition of flaunting one’s own disaffection. But after so many mass shootings accompanied by male manifestos decrying supposed cultural decline, it’s harder than ever to wave away, say, Keenan looking around a Southern California tourist trap during a 2001 Spin interview and remarking, “You want to get out a rifle, stand out on a building, and … erase the karmic debt, so to speak.” I can’t quite get the chuckle I once did from 1996’s “Ænema,” an otherwise awesome anthem that lovingly envisions all the groups of people who will die when Los Angeles falls into the sea.

To be clear, Keenan and his bandmates’ apparent nihilism existed alongside convincing displays of humanism. Early albums of humid funk-metal featured graphic references to sexual abuse, but there was a real empathy to the songs, whose point was that violence only multiplies. (Such songs also echo all-too-relevantly nowadays, and not only because an anonymous Twitter user last year accused Keenan of rape, which he denied.) The band’s two studio albums from the 2000s—which had a cleaner sheen, grander scale, and more pompous manner than Tool’s scuzzily catchy ’90s work—were elaborate lectures on the need to “rediscover communication,” as the band’s spider-skiddering hit “Schism” put it. On Rogan’s podcast, amid chitchat about jiu-jitsu and wine making, Keenan talked about the need to prepare for climate change and find common ground across political differences.

If abstraction-worship and mystical lawmaking can provide much-needed meaning in lives, they can also derail them, which is something that Keenan’s many anti-doctrine, anti-charlatan lyrics recognized. Most often, though, would-be prophets simply make peoples’ eyes glaze over, and there’s a danger of that happening as Tool returns. Fear Inoculum’s lead single stretches Tool’s therapeutic ethos as thinly as it can, with Keenan purring about expelling negativity and resentment. Around him, the drummer Danny Carey has a blast on tablas, the guitarist Adam Jones riffs with delicate majesty, and the bassist Justin Chancellor lobs stones into the cosmic pond and lets us admire the ripples. All the band’s classic ingredients are here, and even more ambitiously deployed than before, but I don’t get that old Tool feeling of having some secret of the universe unveiled. Maybe that’s because this band has already spoken its litany to me before. Or maybe that’s because this is a time when revelations are easy to come by, and often not to be trusted.

Bosnian coach Halilhodzic hired as Morocco coach -38%

Vahid Halilhodzic signed a four-year contract as the new coach of Morocco but was handed a tough list of targets by his new employers. The 67-year-old Bosnian replaces Herve Renard, who quit after

Taylor Swift: I didnt know about my white privilege

The 'ME!' singer-songwriter explained that she had never been educated on her own privilege until recently

Tales Of Corporate Painkiller Pushing: 'The Death Rates Just Soared'

Washington Post journalist Scott Higham says recently released evidence shows the drug industry purposely shipped big quantities of opioids to communities without regard for how they were being used.

On the right and left, too many Jews are happy to be useful idiots -2%

From Benjamin Netanyahu touting Viktor Orban to Bernie Sanders embracing Ilhan Omar, Jewish leaders are eager to endorse any problematic politician. As long as it fits their agenda

From understudy to lead part: Labuschagne mimics Smith in Ashes heroics

Marnus Labuschagne was denied a maiden Test century on Saturday, but you'd have never known it given the standing ovation he received when he left the ground.

The Joy of Six: football and the outside of the boot | Rob Smyth -8%

From Brazilian screamers to an extravagant shank via Peruvian insouciance, we celebrate one of football’s most difficult skills

NB: The point of the Joy of Six is not to rank things, only to enjoy them

Couple face jail for taking sand from Italian beach -9%

We've all been tempted to bring a little bit of paradise home from our holidays. But the urge has backfired on a French couple, who are facing up to six years in prison for removing sand from a beach in Sardinia, where they had been on vacation.

Ann Demeulemeester Doesnt Miss Fashion at All. She Has Other Plans. 20%

There are chickens, a garden and a whole new line of products.

Photos of Woodstock 1969, on Its 50th Anniversary 30%

John Dominis / The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty

Fifty years ago, more than 400,000 people descended on Bethel, New York, headed to a dairy farm owned by Max and Miriam Yasgur, where the Woodstock Music & Art Fair was being held. Planners had told the Yasgurs and town officials that they expected no more than 50,000 attendees, and were overwhelmed by the huge crowds. Over three days, 32 acts performed onstage, including Joan Baez, Santana, the Grateful Dead, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Sly and the Family Stone, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, The Band, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and Jimi Hendrix. Woodstock became a major cultural event, amplified by news coverage, a popular documentary film, and the music that became symbolic of an era.